“Black Beatles” [ft. Gucci Mane]

10

“Black Beatles” is the moment Mike WiLL Made-It discovers a new universe while Rae Sremmurd find new ways to plug their irresistible voices into the pocket. There’s an elemental depth to the composition—Mike WiLL is on some Steve Reich shit. Such an industrial, looming beat became the soundtrack to the viral Mannequin Challenge where people froze, a tacit acknowledgment that the song’s buoyant flair is tempered by a monolithic quality so immense it stops time (fittingly, the Mannequin Challenge helped the brothers overcome underperforming album sales and score their first #1 record). With the fatherly presence of Gucci Mane, hot off his rejuvenated life post-prison, the song crams as much joy into itself as possible, the two young rappers and their Atlanta dad trading bars, comparing themselves to the most hallowed group in rock history. Swae Lee, the same guy who penned the irresistible Beyoncé hook “OK ladies, now let’s get in formation,” turns a meme (“Get you somebody that can do both”) into a sweet croon. By the time Slim Jxmmi declares, “Me and Paul McCartney related!” near the end, this pair has efficiently turned the song’s simple conceptual gag into a reflection of their own songwriting prowess. –Matthew Ramirez

“True Love Waits”

9

For the longest time, it seemed like “True Love Waits” would remain one of the great songs never put to tape in a studio. Originally written around the time of 1995’s The Bends, Radiohead have played it live for years, and its ever-evolving form—from a delicately strummed version to one made opaque by reverb—has been chronicled by bootleggers and fans along the way. Though the band did release an official, stripped-down concert recording of the song in 2001—which producer Nigel Godrich once called “that shitty live version”—the mystery remained.

But then, 21 years after it first graced a stage, “True Love Waits” showed up to close A Moon Shaped Pool. Fans have speculated that Thom Yorke’s own broken heart resulted in this definitive take; it’s more cracked and brittle than any bootleg, with pianos that pull at the singer’s voice like spirits tugging at the corporeal world. Lines that once felt like a plea—“just don’t leave”—sound hopeless now, Yorke singing to his departed lover. Whatever the reason the band felt the song was finally ready, “True Love Waits” is an elegiac coda to one of Radiohead’s most inward-facing albums and a fitting treatment to a song that many already considered a classic. The wait was worth it. –Nathan Reese

“Shut Up Kiss Me”

8

Angel OlsenopensMy Woman with a dreamy prediction that she will “fall in love with you someday.” That haze is short-lived; when “Shut Up Kiss Me” rolls around a few minutes later, she’s suddenly full of determination. “Someday” now translates to “immediately.” There’s no time for debate in her demand to “shut up kiss me hold me tight.” My Woman’s most rockin’ number cuts straight to the point.

Olsen is no stranger to frank expression, but the dogged determination of “Shut Up Kiss Me” shows off many new tools in her arsenal. After her initial attempts at reconciliation prove futile, Olsen pulls out her final tactic: throaty temptation. As she offers herself as a vessel for her lover’s anxieties (“I could make it all disappear/You could feed me all of your fears”), something within Olsen snaps, and the gravity of the situation is truly felt for the first time. In the song’s self-directed video, this moment is represented by Olsen being dragged away on her roller-skates until she falls to the ground, her voice spinning off-kilter until it dissolves past words. There’s no resolution here, but there’s also no doubt that Olsen will get back on her feet and keep trying. –Quinn Moreland

“Work” [ft. Drake]

7

It’s likely that the sweeping popularity of Rihanna’s “Work” led the way in a windfall of dancehall-inspired pop tunes throughout the year, from Tory Lanez’ “Luv” to Sia’s Sean Paul-featuring “Cheap Thrills,” bringing Caribbean riddims and vernacular to the top of the Billboard 100 for the first time in about a decade. (In a year where ethno-nationalism swept the United States, this feat proves Rihanna can be just as political as, say, the Knowles sisters.)

Elsewhere in “Work,” Drake is at his earnest best, playing the emotional foil to Rihanna’s chorus while assuring her that he’d pick her over an equally hot, talented twin. The beat is magical and minimal, with Boi-1da leaving enough space to allow the two superstars to propel the song forward. In a year that gave us two AubRih songs (and plenty of relationship-status speculation), “Work” stands out in its urgent beauty. –Noah Yoo

“Drone Bomb Me”

6

At the center of Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto “The Art of Noises” is a letter from his friend and fellow Futurist F.T. Marinetti. It is a punch-drunk, stream-of-consciousness string of gibberish meant to replicate the concussive tumble of trench warfare—a breathless, onomatopoeic blast of “zang-tumb-tuumb” climaxing in an “orchestra of the noises of war swelling under a held note of silence in the high sky.”

A “held note of silence” isn’t a bad description for the way Anohni’s voice cuts through the rapid-fire chaos—the rat-a-tat drums, the martial fanfare—of Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never’s production in the devastating “Drone Bomb Me,” which she has described as a “love song” from the perspective of a 9-year-old Afghani girl whose family has just been killed by a drone strike. But when she sings “I want to die” in a voice so clear it could stop bullets in mid-air, she turns the Futurists’ macho posturing on its head. In place of noise, Anohni gives us a melody that’s almost unbearably gorgeous. In place of Marinetti’s lust for war and “scorn for woman,” she posits radical empathy—an empathy so extreme, in fact, that it may make you a little uncomfortable. “Blow my head off,” she sings, giving voice to the little girl’s extravagant death wish. “Explode my crystal guts/Lay my purple on the grass.” –Philip Sherburne

“Lazarus”

5

There is no resurrection in “Lazarus.” The song arrives as a moment of tension: a lumbering melody tugged along by mournful saxophones and guitars that sound like heavy doors slamming shut. In it, our narrator finds himself in danger. He drops his cellphone and heads to New York City, desperation never too far behind. He has a fleeting vision of himself in the not-so-distant future: “I’ll be free, just like that bluebird.” After a chaotic squall—the kind of wild, jutting rhythm that Bowie used to ride toward the heavens—things abruptly fade, giving the song an eerie, elliptical end. In his last video, Bowie acts out that finale, looking terrified before flashing a sudden devilish smirk and retreating into the darkness. You forget for a second that he’s acting; then you remember he’s not. –Sam Sodomsky

“Ivy”

4

“Oooh I could hate you now/It’s quite alright to hate me now,” sings Frank Ocean with all the tenderness in the world, “but we both know that deep down/The feeling still deep down is good.” A shimmery guitar intertwines with his voice, and the snake-space formed by their movement is mesmerizing. The only other musical element in this ballad of reflection and regret is a bassline whose understated propulsion allows for subtleties of timing that a rhythm section would deny. Love songs that trade in high-contrast emotions draped over straightforward song structures may be aspirational but they rarely ring true, which is why this love song stays with us, irrefutable and unexpected: “I had no chance to prepare/Couldn’t see you coming.”

After climaxing with a scream, “Ivy” ends amid a scrabble of indeterminate noise. By including the sound of a song being abandoned, Ocean voices what every bruised lover knows: Messiness both fucks with grace and makes it possible. –Jace Clayton

“Cranes in the Sky”

3

“Cranes in the Sky” is a wondrously wrought song about emotional precarity and recovery. If the body and mind are some personal city unto itself, for Solange, the cranes looming above are powerful symbols of how omnipresent and ugly the work of self-care can be. With the help of Raphael Saadiq’s magnificently spacious production, she weaves together a series of defeats and diversions into some landscape of possible healing. It’s a small epic about coming to grips with yourself, framed as a deep, warm, musical embrace. –Kevin Lozano

“Formation”

2

No one was quite prepared for Beyoncé’s “Formation.” The video dropped with little fanfare—just an unlisted link on her website during a Saturday afternoon in the dead of winter. But by the next day, when Bey appeared at the Super Bowl halftime show with Coldplay and Bruno Mars, a new era had dawned. Both song and video were defiant, proud, political: Beyoncé flicked off the camera, sprawled before us, drowning atop a police car. She was taking a stand for herself and for larger issues like Black Lives Matter and police brutality, no longer conforming to the structures around her.

Mike WiLL Made-It’s production begins piercingly, with sparse trap beats rolling into a marching-band stomp. Spindly synths bubble below the surface, a complement to aggressive, proudly black lyrics: “I like my negro nose with Jackson 5 nostrils,” Bey sings at one point. Here, plainly and strongly, is a woman redefining her long-established role as an entertainer; a few months later, upon the release of Lemonade, we also learned that this was a woman advocating for the resiliency and internalized power of all black women in a world that denigrates our minds and bodies. –Britt Julious

I’m tryna keep my faith. But I’m lookin’ for more. Kanye West has always stood before us a troubled, hungry soul, a Rorschach blot of desperation and exuberance. Duringhis frantic, decade-long scramble to the pulsing center of pop culture, he has often seemed a man cursed by dissatisfaction, doomed to pull repeatedly from a thermos of salted water. It’s been hard not to wonder, whether you hated or loved him: What drives this guy? Can anyone keep this up?

Somewhere I can feel safe. And end this holy war. As 2016 dawned uneasily, West seemed, for the first time, capable of succumbing to the exhaustion that was the flip side of his blazing creative energy. He was in the second half of his 30s; he’d had his second child; he was trying to corral an unruly mess of an album that seemed to keep defying basic order and structure. So he opened the album with a prayer. The song is at least 30 percent silence. Silence is not a common guest on Kanye West’s albums. Here, it is the star.

Pray for Paris. Pray for the parents. “Ultralight Beam” is an exalted space, a promise of redemption and healing that felt more fragile and unlikely as the year wore on. It is a song of Godlike perspective from a man who spent most of the year appearing to have none. It’s a Kanye West song with almost no Kanye West in it. Oh, he is responsible for it—technically speaking, he is the reason that Kirk Franklin and Kelly Price are here, sharing space with The-Dream and Chance the Rapper; he’s the motivation behind this thumping, sleepy beat and those rafter-quaking gospel harmonies. But apart from dispensing some words of kindness and benediction, he barely appears. Whatever we are meant to experience inside of this little space, we need him out of the way. He seems to understand this.

This is a God dream. This is everything. Not much felt safe or certain in 2016, the year of crumbling structures and looming threats realized. Humanity’s penchant for destroying itself, for tearing at societal bonds, took its raging turn in the spotlight. There was precious little empathy or palpable love to be found. We all seem exhausted. On November 22, West checked himself into a hospital, shortly after unraveling onstage, for “temporary psychosis due to sleep deprivation and dehydration.” He spent Thanksgiving there, canceling future tour dates. Weeks earlier, his wife had been held up at gunpoint in a brutal robbery. As the darkness closes in, “Ultralight Beam” pulses outward, neither dimming nor brightening as it offers its unchanging message: This is a God dream. This is everything. Everything. –Jayson Greene